Re-thinking Residing Fossils, Once more — Extinct

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Anyway, the critique of “adaptationism” must be extensively heeded. With out explicitly weighing the prices of conceptual complexity in opposition to the advantages, adaptationists hypotheses stay open to objection. There’ll all the time be the likelihood that some price has been missed, some issue suppressed, within the service of the adaptationist narrative. Precisely this appears to have occurred within the case of dwelling fossils. Right here what was missed was the mischief attributable to the absence of a shared evidential framework. This left open the likelihood that the dwelling fossil idea advanced by a type of conceptual drift, which enabled complexity to accrue not as a result of it was helpful, however as a result of it wasn’t actively dangerous.

Novick suggests in her paper that almost all ideas evolve on this neutralist style. Or at the least that we should always take significantly the likelihood that they do. In her phrases, “Conceptual complexity might be web impartial or, extra exactly, practically impartial” (Novick 2022, 7). Which means it’s not adaptive within the sense indicated above; however simply as considerably it’s not deleterious. “Utilizing complicated ideas could also be barely helpful or barely deleterious [depending on the concept]… however these (dis)benefits usually are not so massive as to event a lot fear.” I discover myself questioning: is that this the place discussions of dwelling fossils are headed? Towards the belief that the advantages offered by conceptual complexity roughly stability out the prices? In that case, we should say that the polysemous nature of “dwelling fossil” isn’t precisely useful, however neither is it a scientific catastrophe. Or maybe the scenario is extra severe than this, and the absence of a shared evidential framework actually does threaten the long-term viability of the idea. If an appropriate framework will be constructed, maybe the idea (and the related practices) can keep away from the sickle of purifying choice. If not, it would probably vanish, like so many sphenodontians within the forests and waterways of the distant previous.

References

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Felice, R.N., Pol, D., and Goswami, A. 2021. Complicated macroevolutionary dynamics underlie the evolution of the crocodyliform cranium. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 20210919: doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0919.

Herrera-Flores, J.A., Stubbs, T.L. and Benton, M.J. 2017. Macroevolutionary patterns in Rhynchocephalia: is the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) a dwelling fossil? Palaeontology 60:319–328.

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Novick, R. 2023. The impartial principle of conceptual complexity. Philosophy of Science https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2023.25.

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